Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
THURSDAY 13 JANUARY 2005
PROFESSOR HARRY
BRIGHOUSE, DR
PHILIP HUNTER
CBE AND MR
MARTIN WARD
Q240 Mr Hopkins: You are all educationists
and I have some interest in these matters. To reinforce the point
I have been making about these different types of schools and
this hierarchy of education in Britain, which we agree is economically
and socially damaging, one of the factors in that has been that
the most successful have had rigour and discipline in their education
and the least successful have been subjected to an experiment
in supposed progressive methods, informal teaching methods, which
has caused terrible damage to generations of young people in Britain.
They have lost out. That is being reversed now and that is the
way forward. Would you agree?
Mr Ward: I do not know the answer
to that. I would go back to two points. One is I am sure that
school leaders would prefer that each school should offer a diverse
choice rather than that there should be a whole lot of diversity
between schools. We remain unconvinced that the answer to the
problem is to create lots of different types of schools with different
specialisms, although those schools may individually be very successful.
Given that we are allowing a degree of choice and I do not think
there is any alternative to that in the present political climate,
we have a population and citizenry that expects to make choices,
a lot less deferential than it may have been in previous generations,
and on the whole that is a good thing. Given that we have those
choices being made, we need to pay more attention to helping the
less advantaged to make good choices. On the whole, the middle
classes can look after themselves and do. I know how to play the
system and so do a lot of folk like me. Others perhaps play it
less well and their children however, are no less deserving of
a good education than my children. We need to be paying more attention
to making sure that it is not devil take the hindmost, to use
your words, but that we can support the choice that all parents
make so that all children get a fair opportunity.
Q241 Mr Prentice: You are against
league tables. You tell us they are unhelpful and damaging. If
parents are going to make an informed choice about the education
of their children, what information should be available to them?
Mr Ward: Quite a lot of information,
presented in a coherent way. The present Education Bill has a
provision in it for a school profile. On the whole, we like the
look of that as a way forward. It is not an easy question to answer.
Ideally, what we want is some sort of consumer guide because when
we are trying to decide what computer to buy to put in our back
room the likes of us find it very difficult to understand what
all the options are and will tend to go to a magazine or a consumer
guide that will set them out.
Q242 Mr Prentice: League tables in
soft focus would still allow parents to distinguish between schools.
Mr Ward: They would. What we do
not need to do however is to encourage them to make a simplistic
choice, which is what the present league tables do. Effectively,
they take a very complex organisation—a school is an immensely
complicated beast—and reduce it to one number which does
not reflect what parents are probably most interested in, in many
instances, about their choice of school. If I have a 10 year old,
I want to know that when I send my child to school he or she will
be safe, happy, well supported and well treated. I also want them
to be successful and to learn. But notice the order in which those
came. Even when we are on the "I want them to be successful
and to learn" the league table does not tell me that. What
it tells me is school A has a lot of very bright pupils who do
very well in the exams. School B does not have so many. It does
not tell me whether school A or B is better at bringing on a child
like mine, who may be very bright, of average or even below average
ability. Even if I have a very bright child, the fact that school
A is further up the league tables does not tell me that it does
better for bright children. It just tells me they have more of
them. The league table is, in many cases, misleading and unhelpful
when parents are making their choice. What we need to be looking
at is value added data. You referred to the school in Bradford
as being particularly successful at adding value. That really
is a key figure for people to be looking at. In a sense, I am
arguing not for doing away with information being made available
to parents; I am arguing for them to have more information, better
presented so that they can make a more rational decision.
Q243 Mr Prentice: What is wrong with
a parent just going on the internet and having a look at the latest
Ofsted report on the school?
Mr Ward: There is nothing wrong
with that. No doubt many parents do that. There are two points.
One is the latest Ofsted report is not a full picture. It is a
better picture than simply looking at a figure on a league table
but the Ofsted inspections, which are improving, in the past have
tended to replicate the league tables effectively because the
inspectors look at those examination figures before they inspect
the school. That is also not a full answer. The other point is
some parents will do it just like that. You and I would. We probably
have an internet connection running right by our elbows. We know
how to work it. You smile.
Q244 Mr Prentice: When I mentioned
the internet I knew I should not have because someone is going
to say 40% of the population do not have access to it.
Mr Ward: It is not only the literal,
physical access to it; we need to support those parents who would
find that extremely difficult even if they had gone past that
particular barrier and had the information in front of them. What
they have is pages and pages of text which they are going to find
very difficult to understand and find their way through. We need
to look for ways of supporting them in making good choices.
Mr Hopkins: The Moser Report concluded
that 50% of the population do not understand what 50% means and
20% are functionally illiterate. How are they going to handle
the internet? They are the ones we ought to be worrying about.
Q245 Annette Brooke: I happen to
come from an area that probably has every type of school imaginable
including grammar schools. The way the admissions policy works,
which I support given the system that we have, is that the first
preference goes to the grammar school. Then there is a good chance
that you might not get the second preference. The outcome of this
is that many parents feel that they are following the least worst
option when they put their number one preference, which really
distorts the whole matter of choice. I think most of you are going
to be against forms of selection anyway but it occurred to me
you could get a similar problem if you had your four non-selective
schools in a town and the one oversubscribed one has a lottery
for the places. Would there not then be an instinctive reaction
to go for a safety place rather than choosing what people want?
Could I have some comments?
Dr Hunter: There is a debate running
in many areas of the country about first preference, first systems
against equal preference systems. I will not go into the complexities
of all that but there are two ways of doing it. A number of local
education authorities and admission fora are debating that actively
all the time. Some heads passionately favour one and others passionately
favour the other. For example, in Calderdale where this came up
recently, what we were faced with there was a bunch of school
heads saying they wanted equal preference and a bunch of other
heads saying they wanted first preference first. Both of them
were arguing that that is what the parents of Calderdale wanted.
They had no evidence at all about what the parents of Calderdale
really wanted. I said, "Before you come back to me with this
question again, I want to see some evidence. Commission some research
from somebody or other who can tell us what the parents of Calderdale
really want." I think we need to see more research about
what parents want in terms of the system for allocating school
places and in terms of the information they may need.
Professor Brighouse: The school
district in Monclere, New Jersey, has a public choice system so
they are all state schools and people choose among them. My understanding
is that when they set it all up they surveyed the parents about
what kinds of schools they wanted. I do not know how they went
about doing this. They reinvented the whole school district and
they set up the school district in such a way that if 10% of parents
said they wanted a French immersion school, for example, you had
a school with roughly 10% of places which was a French immersion
school. In the initial set up you design the schools to meet the
initial wanting and then you do the lottery and choice. People
choose what they want. How it evolved over time I do not know.
It would be interesting to look at the study of how it worked
because that would tell you something at least about where you
had control over what to do about this and how you could implement
something anew. There are no perfect ways of allocating children
to schools. You will not find some way that everybody is happy
with. In my life and maybe some of you in your lives make the
second best choice because you know you will get it. That is not
so bad. That is not a terrible thing. It is terrible to choose
the worst thing because you know you will get it. If everybody
were doing that, that would be awful but if lots of people are
making second best choices because they want the security of it,
that may not be so terrible.
Q246 Chairman: It is not a bad world
really.
Professor Brighouse: No.
Q247 Chairman: That is a philosophy
for life, is it not?
Professor Brighouse: It is.
Q248 Annette Brooke: It does not
fit in with this model when we are told we must have more choice,
when the reality out there is people are not necessarily making
their first choices.
Dr Hunter: "Choice"
is a qualitative word. If you are a Roman Catholic, you want to
see your children in a Roman Catholic school. That is pretty basic
and you want that pretty badly, or you are supposed to. If you
are a Roman Catholic and you have two Roman Catholic schools within
travelling distance, you may well have a preference for one of
those schools but it is a different degree of choice. I told the
Education and Skills Select Committee in the autumn that, when
my wife and I were going through this business for our children,
we were allocated a school for our eldest child. We decided we
did not want it, appealed and were successful in getting another
school, by which time we had changed our minds. Parents are like
that. The people who are dealing with them have to understand
that.
Chairman: Are you sure you are equipped
to be the chief schools adjudicator?
Q249 Mr Prentice: We know what you
think about parents. You think they are gullible and are taken
in by logos and swanky names. I want to ask about specialist schools
because two thirds of schools in England now are specialist schools,
dance, drama, engineering and so on. Do parents feel this has
enhanced choice in any meaningful way?
Mr Ward: I would say not.
Q250 Mr Prentice: Is there any research
on this?
Mr Ward: No. That is why I hesitated
because I do not have anything very definite to go on, other than
what school leaders report to me, so this is all anecdote and
ad hoc. The majority of secondary schools now are specialist
schools. Many of my members therefore have chosen to go down that
route. The great majority of them have done so because it has
given their school some extra status or some extra money, rather
than because they had any particular burning desire to emphasise
their modern language work or their sports work, or whatever it
might be. That is not all of them. To be fair, some of them did
want to do those things and have said, "We really want to
be a sports college. We see the advantage of doing that and it
is going to improve the education that we offer our children in
very explicit ways across the board." Most of them have not
gone down that route. One would say that most parents who are
choosing a school nominally because of its specialist nature are
choosing it because they think it is, in some more general sense,
better. They are again playing the admissions system.
Q251 Mr Prentice: Who decides what
the specialism should be? Is it the school? Are there instances
when the school decides to canvass the views of parents? Should
we be a dance and drama specialist school or a language specialist
school? Does that happen?
Mr Ward: I do not know to what
extent schools have canvassed parents. They will certainly have
consulted parents to some degree, if only via the governing body
which has parent representatives on it. The school will generally
have chosen a specialism in order to have the best chance of getting—
Q252 Mr Prentice: The parents are
cut out of all this. It is just something that the education establishment
decides. If there is extra money for specialist status, there
is not a dance and drama specialist school within 20 miles. Let
us go for dance and drama. It is just as mechanistic as that and
parents are completely cut out of it?
Mr Ward: I would not say that
parents were completely cut out of it and I certainly would not
say that in all instances. I would be in trouble with some of
my members if I do, who will immediately send me an e-mail, I
am sure, to say, "Here at such and such a school we did not
do any such thing." There will be instances where schools
have gone to great lengths to check with the parents.
Q253 Mr Prentice: Does it make any
practical difference or is it just the illusion of choice that
we have academies, leading edge partnerships and leading beacon
schools? We have a multiplicity of different schools that this
government has brought in. Does it really make any difference
at all?
Mr Ward: It does make some differences
but probably not in the way that the labels would suggest. I go
back to a phrase I have used several times already. We would prefer
there to be more diversity within each school and less diversity
between one school and another, which on the whole is presenting
an illusion of choice. Yes, I would agree with you.
Q254 Chairman: I want to come back
to something that has been behind a lot of the conversation we
have had where I think there is a difference of approach between
some of you which I would like to bring out. Most of the specialists
focus on what we do about people who cannot exercise a lot of
choice in life because they are poor, they live in areas which
are disadvantaged and they go to schools which reflect that. What
can we do about those kinds of schools and those kinds of people?
It seems to me that, Professor Brighouse, you are saying to us
that there are things that we can do. You are quite keen on what
you call progressive vouchers, which is a way of trying to get
people out of schools that they do not want to go to and into
schools they might want to go to, using the state to engineer
that through a progressive or loaded voucher system. Philip's
position is that the task is to sort out the schools that are
not doing very well and it seems to me there are different approaches
to this. They are both social engineering but they are different
approaches and I would like to have a brief exchange as to which
one we ought to be guided towards.
Professor Brighouse: The advantage
of a loaded voucher type of approach has two features to it. One
is that lots of people are perfectly satisfied with their schools.
They will not move their kids. It is the ones who are not satisfied
who will use the option. It does two things. It gives them the
ability to get out in the worst case but it also gives them the
ability to exercise some power over the school. It may be that
you end up not taking your kid out because you get what you want
or you change the situation for your kid. Doing the kind of thing
for your kid that educated, middle class parents are used to doing
and often do within the schools they have their children in they
are partly enabled to do because they have the option of access.
The reason I think it is important to have a progressive or loaded
voucher is that if an outcome of the choice process is that you
get a concentration of poor kids into one school, a concentration
of kids who are harder to educate, they are bringing with them
the resources that are needed to educate them. It is a progressive
feature of the voucher. The voucher itself is a way of enabling
people to get out of bad situations. The progressive feature of
the voucher is a way of enabling the government to target resources
well to kids. I like choice with spare capacity which enables
schools to be closed, effectively. When schools are not chosen,
they disappear. I am not wildly optimistic about the long term
ability of governments to turn schools around. I used to be very
sceptical of the ability of governments to do that. There have
been some successes in the way that it has been done in the last
few years so I am a little less sceptical than I used to be.
Q255 Chairman: People would be able
to cash their vouchers in wherever, would they not?
Professor Brighouse: I am very
sceptical of using private schools for this.
Q256 Chairman: If they sought to
cash their voucher at a school which was over-subscribed, it would
not help them very much.
Professor Brighouse: That is right.
That is why you need the spare capacity. If they do not win in
the lottery, their kid does not get into that school, but at least
the kid takes a lot of money with them to whatever school they
go to.
Q257 Chairman: What about the argument
which Philip may give us, which is that, by building the exit
option in the way that you are describing it, it makes life more
difficult for the school whose problems we want to attack?
Dr Hunter: I will not argue that.
Q258 Chairman: Argue what you want
to argue.
Dr Hunter: I think we have a progressive
voucher system. That is what delegation and the formula for schools
have done. I would argue that we should make that work as well
as we can through the choices we have, but there are going to
be, as a result of that, a small number of schools that are in
grave difficulties because they have a concentration of children
that are difficult to teach. Once you get over 25 or 30% of difficult
kids who are really difficult to teach, that school is in trouble.
Then you have to make a decision. You need to have local authorities
with powers and the facilities and expertise to make those decisions.
You have to shut the thing or create an academy and spend £30
million on it and really try to make it go. What you cannot do
is to muddle along and hope things will sort themselves out. I
am very much in favour of shutting a number of schools. I did
it in Stoke-on-Trent, where it was pretty obvious that the school
was not going to succeed. It was in the days before we had academies
and large amounts of money to throw at them. Nowadays, you have
a choice. You either shut it or you spend a lot of money on it.
Q259 Chairman: Voucherising some
children to leave that institution?
Dr Hunter: We have that now. That
is what they do. If a child wants to go to another school, they
can go and take the money with them. That is what the budget system
does for them.
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